I know it is too early for 2012 predictions and let us consider this to be the preview of what will come towards the end of this year. Cloud Expo is round the corner and Jeremy Geelan asked me to send him five predictions for 2012 as a part of Cloud Expo preview. They have published predictions by some Industry Analysts on what is in store for 2012 and it also includes my predictions. I thought I will share them here too. For a more complete list, please visit this page.

PaaS is the future of cloud services and we will see some interesting business model innovations in 2012.

Federated clouds will take off in a big way and we will be seeing more and more cloud brokerage services helping buyers navigate the ecosystem.

2012 will be the year when the marriage between big data and cloud will strengthen. Though we will be seeing more on the analytics side in 2012, we will also be seeing some efforts to remove the inertia associated with big data.

The convergence of mobile, cloud and social will accelerate and by the end of 2012, cloud apps that are not “socially aware” and without mobile support will be looked down as “legacy apps”. Also, we will see more and more application vendors bringing in feature parity in their apps for different mobile applications. Towards the end of 2012, mobile web apps will dominate over native apps.

Watch out for some interesting cloud adoption trends in the Indian sub-continent and APAC region. They will soon become the biggest market for clouds.

By the end of this year, I will do a more comprehensive report on what is in store for 2012 and beyond as I did last year.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.

Will companies still looking to adopt cloud (and there are many still positioning themselves for it) want to go directly to PaaS instead of first adapting existing systems or existing expertise to IaaS? Will they next opt for something like CloudFoundry, which still requires them to maintain control of some infrastructure? Will they go for something more abstract?

IBM seems to be leading some of the big data to cloud initiative with BigData University: http://bigdatauniversity.com/. This has been picking up steam pretty significantly.

I’m also with you on the APAC and Indian markets. A whole slew of new service providers and regional datacenter will be coming to market next year to better serve those markets.

As a side note, RightScale will be hosting our conference and offering perspectives on these topics at the same time as CloudExpo. There are free VIP CloudExpo passes still available through http://www.rightscale.com/conference if any of your readers are interested.